A bit complicated to try to word out, but here goes…
You have a show, season 1 contains 8 episodes, you watch them, you move on to season 2 which has 8 episodes, but hang on - there’s some stuff that happened in episode 8 of season 1 that hasn’t been covered in episode 1 of season 2 - “What happened to Geri???” etc etc Oh that’s right, there was a ‘Special’ episode that aired in between seasons 1 & 2 over the xmas holidays, and it’s in the ‘Specials’ season but hang on - it’s episode 2 in there, because episode 1 is a behind the scenes featurette - wtf?
So the way that TheTVDB organises specials episodes can make it confusing within PLEX as to which episodes should be watched between seasons, if indeed any.
Is there a way of handling this irritating situation that I’m unaware of, besides looking it up manually on The TVDB? TIA.
Specials, because there is very little consistency, is a manual effort. Even box sets are a manual effort.
What most have adopted, myself included, is using a self-defined episode numbering for everything placed in the “Specials” season directory.
Specials/
Name - S00E101 - Special 1 from season 1.ext
Name - S00E204 - Special 4 from season 2.ext
etc.
Ugly? Yes. Effective? Yes.
@ChuckPa said:
What most have adopted, myself included, is using a self-defined episode numbering for everything placed in the “Specials” season directory.
Specials/
Name - S00E101 - Special 1 from season 1.ext
Name - S00E204 - Special 4 from season 2.ext
So how does this work in practice? Are you using episode ‘numbering data’ from TheTVDB, or are you using custom numbering and custom titling, which Plex then displays in the client UI?
Specials and episodes have an ‘Originally Aired’ meta datum (Atleast when the tv show was ‘matched’ against TheTVDB).
This is used to put the right special into OnDeck when it’s due.
@OttoKerner said:
Specials and episodes have an ‘Originally Aired’ meta datum (Atleast when the tv show was ‘matched’ against TheTVDB).
This is used to put the right special into OnDeck when it’s due.
But that does not and has never worked for me. As an example there are several “special” episodes for Babylon 5 and I have all the episodes and all the specials all named exactly as Plex wants and the metadata appears correctly for all of them. However the episodes never play after the episodes that they should appear after.
ex. I start watching Bab 5 from the beginning and I get to s04e08 - The Illusion of Truth. After that completes the special Thirdspace should be On Deck but, instead s04e09 - Atonement shows up On Deck and the specials do not play until after the end of the series.
So saying that the episodes appear in On Deck in the order they should is simply wrong. However I wonder if appending the special after the preceding episode would get them to play correctly. The episodes could be named something like:
Babylon 5 - s04e08 - pt1
Babylon 5 - s04e08 - pt2
would allow playback in the correct order but it would not have the correct metadata for the special but, maybe that could be added manually.
I wish Plex had some mechanism that allowed, even manually, the insertion of episodes between existing ones and still be treated as separate. The metadata and posters could be inserted manually as it is a pretty rare occurrence but it would allow for proper ordered playback of specials that should appear during a season.
@Elijah_Baley said:
But that does not and has never worked for me.
It’s working for me. Have you checked that your episodes have an ‘Originally aired’ date in their properties?
@OttoKerner said:
@Elijah_Baley said:
But that does not and has never worked for me.
It’s working for me. Have you checked that your episodes have an ‘Originally aired’ date in their properties?
I have discovered, after checking as you suggested, that the "originally aired’ dat is there but it is the actual date the show aired. That is in the above example “Thirdspace” was released after the end of Babylon 5 but, timeline wise it was intended to be between the episodes listed. That is I want to view it in the proper order rather that the order actually aired.
I guess that I want a feature added to Plex to allow manual insertion of episodes into the actual aired order.
I am trying to see if I manually change the aired date to do what I want will fix the issue but I have noticed that sometimes/often manual changes do not stick.
I am rewatching Bab 5 right now and I am up to s02e20 so it will be a little while before Thirdspace comes up but I have changed the date and I will just allow the process to continue and see what happens.
Thank you for pointing me to a way to maybe get what I want. Fortunatly I do not run into that often in my watching and for the few series that need it a manual edit of the aired date field is not too much trouble.
Thanks again.
